Gender and Citizenship in the Arab World

What is Citizenship? Citizenship consists of the legal processes by which subjects of a state are defined. These processes set out the criteria for citizenship and the rights and obligations of citizens in relation to the state. To use Collier, Maurer, and Suarez-Navaz’s (1995) phrase, citizenship “constructs the subject of law” (p. 5). Citizenship, however, is also a set of practices - legal, political, economic, and cultural (Turner, 1993, p. 2). The practices of citizenship, while influenced by the laws, differ from the written laws. Citizenship also generates social processes by which subjects are made, invented, constructed (Ong, 1996, p. 737). Since classical political thinkers usually discussed the citizen in terms of an abstract person (the citizen as an “individual” with undifferentiated, uniform and universal properties, rights, and duties) the citizen appeared in much of classical political theory to be neutral in cultural and gender terms (Marshall, 1950; Benedix, 1964; Keane, 1988; Barbalet, 1988a, 1988b; Culpitt, 1992; Turner, 1993; Twine, 1994). And because constitutions and laws are written in terms of such an abstract citizen, they may appear equitable. But recent research has revealed systematic means by which citizenship, in most countries of the world, has been a highly gendered enterprise, in practice and on paper (Pateman, 1988; Phillips, 1991, 1993; Yuval-Davis, 1991, 1993, 1997; Lister, 1997a; Voet, 1998). The “civic myths” (Smith, 1997) which underlie notions of citizenship in most states often conceal inequalities or attempts to justify them on the basis of family, religion, history, or other cultural terms